IT Reliability in Plain English

At Correlsense, we sell a software product called SharePath, which is the first coherent IT Reliability solution for enterprises.

So what is IT Reliability? In general, it is about allowing IT staff to take control of their multi-tiered, distributed applications.

The sole purpose of an IT organization is to make sure business transactions are processed as fast and as accurate as possible. CIOs and their IT staff need to know what is going on now, and compare it to what happened last month. They need to be able to determine:

Who is misusing or corrupting the data

What physical and virtual resources will be needed

How to maintain a clear picture of dependencies between physical and logical components

How to make sure changes to applications and infrastructure don’t create any unexpected results, and make the business departments pay for what they are using in practice rather than in theory.

This is exactly what SharePath is for.

SharePath is a collector-based software product that is deployed on all the logical components that compose an application, in a production environment, with almost zero overhead. The logical components are: proxies, Web servers, application servers, databases, LDAP servers, queue managers, even proprietary stuff – self developed or any other third-party solution which is in use. Using SharePath, each transaction activation is traced, from the moment a single user clicks a button on their desktop—browser or “fat client”—to the last call in the mainframe. Everything is recorded, correlated and allows full accountability of every single action within every single application.

All of this data is managed in an RMDB (Reliability Management Database) – a transaction database composed of tens of millions of “transaction flows” (raw data), and an OLAP cube view of users, transactions, transaction segments, tiers, servers and everything that IT requires. This is collected and produced automatically (including topology auto-discovery and inter-dependencies) and allows IT organizations to manage their SLAs, performance problems, automatic root cause analysis at a level that was never before possible. In addition, this valuable data set can be used for auditing and archiving of every business transaction, security (the 4 W’s – who, what, when and where), capacity planning, change management, population of configuration databases (CMDB), and chargebacks.

So SharePath enables IT organizations to become much more manageable, more accountable, or in other words – RELIABLE.